What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Ensure that all teachers plan and teach challenging lessons that inspire all students, including the most able, to make fast progress.
- Analyse the reasons why a minority of students on A-level courses and White British students underperform, and act quickly to improve performance.
- Improve the analysis of data, particularly on students’ participation in work experience and the destinations of students progressing into employment, and use this analysis to identify fully strengths and weaknesses in course content relating to employability, and to make improvements where needed.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Improve achievement rates for students by:
- identifying those courses where achievement is low and ensuring that rigorous actions plans are put in place to drive rapid improvements
- identifying any variances between different cohorts of students and putting into place appropriate interventions.
- Continue to improve staff development and share good practice to ensure that teachers in all lessons have effective strategies to check learning and progress accurately and use a wide range of resources, methods and activities.
- Increase the range of opportunities for formal external work experience so that a larger proportion of students can extend their learning by developing their employment skills.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Improve outcomes for students further by:
- ensuring teachers reinforce high expectations in all lessons, including the importance of punctuality
- making targets for students more individualised to help them achieve and ensure they meet them
- displaying high-quality students’ work in all classrooms and around the college to promote high aspirations and share best practice.
- Increase the proportion of good and better teaching by:
- giving more detailed and explicit feedback so that students know what to do and how to improve the quality of their work
- ensuring that all teachers consistently mark and correct spelling and grammatical errors in students’ work
- making sure that teachers provide students with the study skills needed to achieve well
- providing more challenge for higher-ability students so that more of them can achieve higher grades
- supporting all curriculum teams to evaluate provision rigorously and use all available data to evaluate the impact of teaching on learning.
What does the college need to do to improve further?
- Develop further, and more quickly, the sharing of best practice within and across curriculum areas to eliminate inconsistencies in teaching, learning and assessment and to ensure that all teaching is at least good. Evaluate fully the impact of actions implemented recently. Use this evaluation to inform actions that target subjects where more rapid improvements in success rates are required and ensure that all students benefit from high quality lessons that enable them to make rapid progress and achieve their potential.
- Ensure that all teachers have high expectations of students. Support teachers to set realistic but challenging targets that motivate students. Monitor closely students’ progress towards their targets and continue to take swift action when students who they are responsible for are at risk of underachieving.
- Monitor rigorously the implementation of the college’s strategy to ensure a more consistent approach to improving students’ English and mathematical skills. Develop teachers’ skills and confidence to enable them to provide better support for students who need to improve their literacy and/or numeracy skills. Ensure that written feedback is specific and constructive so that students know where they have gone wrong and what they need to do to improve.
- Develop a more robust strategy for both additional learning support and subject support, including workshops, to ensure that more students, especially those identified as needing greater help, take advantage of the extra support offered to help them achieve as well as they should.
- Strengthen the arrangements for performance management to ensure that all teachers and managers are accountable for specific targets linked to outcomes for the students they teach. Ensure that managers use and evaluate a range of data accurately, including outcomes of lesson observations, success rates and value-added data, to inform performance management of all staff and to set realistic and challenging targets for improvement that are linked to strategic objectives.
- Strengthen quality assurance arrangements. Ensure that all college processes, such as lesson observation, target-setting, marking and assessment are all completed to a high standard. Increase the rigour and evaluative nature of self-assessment and the targeted use of data, especially at course level, so that it is used to inform targeted actions for improvement.
- Improve the capacity of governors to hold leaders to account and evaluate the quality of provision.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- low success rates for students on AS programmes and some vocational courses
- insufficiently developed arrangements for improving learners’ skills in language, literacy and numeracy
- the links with employers in some curriculum areas
- the effectiveness of group tutorials
- links between lesson observations and professional development of staff
- the slow progress of initiatives to raise success rates
- aspects of self-assessment
- insufficiently developed strategic planning in some areas.
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